A better way to travel

Travelling around swathes of West Bengal and the metropolis of Kolkata this time round (it was full holiday season too), it struck me with renewed force how utterly alike people are becoming everywhere – in this country at least. And it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if they had become alike in good manners and civic sense. But it is most evident to anyone who cares to notice that all the resemblance applies to undesirable traits: the same spitting and littering right and left, the same unconcern for traffic and parking rules (and eagerness to quarrel if anyone points out they are breaking rules), the same loud and coarse jokes, the same hogging (and it is hogging I mean – I have nothing against decent eating!), the same jostling and queue-jumping, the same disdain for other people’s convenience, the same vulgar display of new-gotten wealth, the same obsession with shopping malls everywhere (why go to places which are of historical/cultural significance, then, if all you want to do is shop and eat?). I don’t go abroad, but I am alarmed to hear that the streets of Singapore and Dubai are crowded with Indians exactly of the sort I have described, and road signs in Switzerland are being written in Hindi, and there are streets in London and New York which sound and smell like any town in India, and imagining what kind of crowds I might have to rub shoulders with in such places, I say a quiet ‘God forbid’ inside my mind.

I used to love travelling, and have travelled far and wide for a long time. Of late, however, I notice I am becoming less inclined to travel for pleasure. Travel-related books and video CDs, meanwhile, have become widely and cheaply available – you can visit any place from Antarctica to Greece to the Ajanta caves to Shantiniketan from the comfort and safety of home, avoiding all the expense, worry, risk and annoyance of having to rub shoulders with vast hordes of unpleasant people. Even watching Durga puja or Christmas celebrations around the town is done best on TV. Maybe, in the years to come, that is the way I will travel for choice!

P.S., Jan. 10: I found this absolutely hilarious little essay on the net, and though the author is a foreigner, my sympathies lie entirely with him.